d by all, hence the flower
becomes regular from the increase in number of its irregular elements.
These latter cases, then, are due to an excess of development, hence the
application of the term pleiomorphy. It must be understood that mere
increase in the number of the organs of a flower is not included under
this head, but under that of deviations from the ordinary number of
parts.

FOOTNOTES:

[231] [Greek: Pleios-morphosis].

CHAPTER I.

IRREGULAR PELORIA.

The term peloria was originally given by Linne to a malformation of
_Linaria vulgaris_, with five spurs and five stamens, which was first
found in 1742 near Upsal. This was considered so marvellous a
circumstance that the term peloria, from the Greek [Greek: pelor], a
prodigy, was applied to it.[232] After a time other irregular flowers
were found in like condition, and so the term peloria became applied to
all cases wherein, on a plant habitually producing irregular flowers,
regular ones were formed. The fact that this regularity might arise from
two totally different causes was overlooked, or at least not fully
recognised, even by Moquin-Tandon himself. Where a flower retains
throughout life the same relative size in its parts that it had when
those parts first originated the result is, of course, a regular flower,
as happens in violets and other plants. This kind of peloria may for
distinction sake be called regular or congenital peloria (see chapter on
that subject); but where a flower becomes regular by the increase in
number of its irregular portions, as in the _Linaria_ already alluded
to, where not only one petal is spurred, but all five of them are
furnished with such appendages, and which are the result of an irregular
development of those organs, the peloria is evidently not congenital,
but occurs at a more or less advanced stage of development. To this
latter form of peloria it is proposed to give the distinctive epithet of
irregular.

Peloria is either complete or incomplete; it is complete when the flower
appears perfectly symmetrical, it is incomplete when only a portion of
the flower is thus rendered regular. It is very common, for instance, to
find violets or Linarias with two or three spurs, and these intermediate
stages are very interesting, as they serve to show in what way the
irregularity is brought about. In _Antirrhinum_, _Linaria_, &c.,
intermediate forms show very clearly that it is to the repetition of the
form usually a